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Panama Papers: The awkward truth about the Blairmore fund

These facts are awkward for the Prime Minister: In the early 1980s his father Ian helped to establish an offshore fund, unabashedly named ‘Blairmore’ after the family’s ancestral family home in Aberdeenshire, which avoided ever having to pay tax in Britain.

These facts are awkward because they raise questions for a Prime Minister who has staked his reputation on tackling tax avoidance; who used his G8 speech in 2013 to argue for international transparency and said, “It matters because some people use complicated and fake structures to hide their profits and avoid their taxes”; who banned “bearer shares” – which allow the anonymous transfer of assets and opened up UK Companies House; who employs a man as his Chancellor who calls tax avoidance “morally repugnant” and whose office, in the light of the Panama Papers, issues a standard line which states that David Cameron is determined “to take action to tackle evasion and aggressive tax avoidance”.

Ian Cameron was obviously a successful father and by all accounts a decent and popular man but he took a different view on tax and made no secret of it in the context of Blairmore. He was the fund’s highest-paid director and is identified in a prospectus issued to wealthy investors which boasted that “the Fund will not be subject to United Kingdom corporation tax or income tax on its profits”.

That prospectus was printed and distributed in 2006, following David Cameron’s election as leader of the Conservative Party. So an awkward question: was David Cameron aware of the prospectus? And another: what knowledge does the Prime Minister have of his family’s off-shore interests? And if these questions will not be answered by Downing Street, there’s another: how does the Prime Minister reconcile his own approach to tax with that of his father?

And that question is most important because it’s a microcosm of an honest debate Britain should have about tax and foreign ownership.

7 thoughts on “Panama Papers: The awkward truth about the Blairmore fund”

The media’s handling of tax evasion and avoidance is interesting.BBC news interviewing an expert on tax evasion who could only think that their use was based in good intentions-a complete whitewash.The guardian is not allowing comments-they exploited tax loopholes according to Private Eye.
This constant afffirmation that off-shore tax havens are by-and- large a good thing,’with many good reasons for using them is morally repugnant when people have died and killed themselves in the ideologically driven austerity,the proliferation of foodbanks[never mentioned now] and thousands of malnourished children.
How could tax evasion through these means be anything other than disgusting?
The Panama tax documents is demonstrating how effectively the press and media manage potentially damaging information,how they control the flow and presentation of information and therefore effectively control the political narrative..
Dangerous times for democracy.

“how does the Prime Minister reconcile his own approach to tax with that of his father?”

Suppose, that David Cameron is clean, unlikely, but possible. If you consider that he undertook his schooling and early life at the cost to the (Hard Working) taxpayer to attain his current position as PM, that is just as distasteful as current tax evasion.

Part of Downing Street office’s reply ‘to take action to tackle evasion and AGGRESSIVE (my emphasis tax avoidance”.. Note the word ‘aggressive’, Mr Cameron is just morally incapable of giving a straight answer. This is another example in microcosm of the morality deficit that enables massively wealthy individuals from paying tax on their massive incomes (these people have a National Lottery win every year of their lives (and that’s inflation adjusted and includes most immediate and close family members and continues through retirement; as it’s not reliant on them actually doing that much).
Note corporations are legally classified as an individual person, but they are not breathing beings, that can suffer pain or hunger. So they’ll not stave, or need retirement funds nor need health care.
Back to real people, our wealth/income has been falling year on year, job security and hours per person is falling even faster. Unlike corporations we need health care and an education and they are being held back too. The legal entity that is a corporation, does not have accidents at work and they do not suffer from unemployment (they can go bust, but there is not a ‘body/person to suffer.
This morale deficit of the rich AND morally corrupt and the inhuman acts of inhuman entities have not only adverse financial consequences for the vast majority of British people but are a morale cancer that eats at the heart of our society. Anyone who doubts the Prime minister’s role in this, even how he has cheered this on, should listen to, or read a transcript of, a Mansion House speech given a few years ago. In that speech he says, and verbally underlines. that greed is good, yes greed is good..No ifs and no buts about it; and greed is what drives these morally corrupt ‘individuals/.

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